Though both marketing angles focus on the same objective (Increasing leads / website traffic / revenue), PPC and SEO are very different from each other in many different ways. All too often do I get asked the question, “John, should I consider SEO or PPC as an addition to my marketing strategy, and why?” and my following response usually sounds like this.
PPC (Pay per click) is a sprint. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a Marathon. So to summarize before diving completely into this question…..
Which is Better, SEO or PPC?
It all depends on the long or short term goals of the campaign, there is no right or wrong answer.
PPC Achieves Almost Instant Results
SEO Achieves Long-Term Results
PPC is Pay to Play
SEO is Pay to Stay
Both PPC and SEO Can Be Disastrous When Partnering With the Wrong Provider.
If you follow SEO Signals Lab on Facebook I think its safe to assume you’ve seen me mention this case study several times. The internet is every flowing with individual, small business, and large agencies alike who are selling the very same thing. Leads, traffic, and increased revenue. If everyone sells the same thing, how do you expect your prospect to make a choice on which digital marketing agency to use? How can you be sure that your prospect chooses you and not your competitor who is trying to out bid you?
Simply put, you have to stand out, and because so many marketers already have flashy proposals, tools, and “Case Studies”, its hard to use those leverages to stroke your prospects interests.
You know what irritates me the most? All the “How to start a SEO Company” articles from quote “SEOs” who havnt even broken 100K in annual revenue. Nothing makes my blood boil more than seeing underachieved people telling people how to strategically start a SEO company. Let’s step back for a minute, I understand what I just wrote seems very salty, however keep in mind that I’m not taking away achievements made by anyone, it’s just I believe in order to give SOLID STARTUP ADVICE, YOU NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL YOURSELF.
Disclaimer: Proudly representing zero affiliate links in this article.
“Sell the the problem you solve, not your product or service.” Keeping that quote close to my chest when entering phone calls with a new prospect client has enabled me to take part in 10xing our revenues at PlacementSEO. Nailing your first phone call is easy when you train yourself to speak to the mind and emotions of your prospect, and this video, I’m going to explain how I do just that when entering any phone call I take for the first time with any prospect.
In the video above we’re going to learn together how to address these common questions asked by many marketers when calling a prospect for the first time.
Q: How do I turn a conversation into a pitch
Q: How do I avoid awkward silence
Q: How do I determine if the prospect is genuinely interested in my service?
Most people have never heard of the term SEO, or search engine optimization. Unless they are in business, they probably don’t have a clue as to how SEO affects them every day. In reality, SEO affects everyone who has ever searched for something on the internet. The order of websites that pop up for an internet search aren’t random. In fact, they are decided by complex algorithms uniquely decided by each search engine (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo).
When a user types “best cellphones 2018” into their web browser, also known as a keyword search, they are shown the results that hopefully most apply to that search. The search engines decide the order in which the sites are listed based on relevancy factors, so users only see results related to their search. SEO maximizes the chances of websites to snag one of those top spots by telling the search engine why they deserve to be there. Since most people don’t move past the first page of search results when using Google, Bing or Yahoo, those top spots become critical for a business’ online visibility. Given that there are only ten spots on the first page of any search result, the competition for those limited spots is fierce.
If I stood on a stage in-front of 1,000 SEO’s and asked the question, “Who here uses cold emailing as part of their outbound marketing?”, I can almost assure you that less than 100 people would raise their hands. Crazy, right? Honestly, not really. Cold email has proven to be the hell birthed marketing strategy that fights off every lazy and unmotivated marketer on the internet… that is until now.
Over the last year, working with my business partner while continuing world domination as a SEO agency, we’ve been leveraging cold email as one of our top three outbound marketing strategies. I mean heck, we even have a team of VAs who work full time helping us with this strategy.
The results of our tried, repeat, and proven cold email strategy? More than 500K a year from cold emailing alone.
1%, 2.5%, 4%, do those numbers seem way too familiar and recurring? Those numbers are the most frequently experienced averages when talking talking about open rates. When taking CTR’s into account (click through rates), a lot of you likely experience numbers much lower than the ones I just showed you.
Lets Get to the Good Stuff, Please!
Alright, as promised, I’m giving you the email script I used to score Salesforce.com. However, I’ve done a little extra and have given you an ADDITIONAL 4 email scripts that give me more than a 80% Open rate and 40% CTR! Just click the like button below and you can download the files, and video, for FREE.
I recently asked YOU to ask some questions that I would answer in my next video. Today, I answered eight questions related to scaling, marketing, leads, and more! Don’t miss it right here. Also, do YOU have any questions about marketing, running a digital agency, or scaling? As them in the comments below and Ill do my best to answer all that I can!
Over at Placement SEO, the search engine marketing agency I co-own with my partner, Gary Simpson, we produce several thousand guest posts per month. It’s quite a feat keeping up with demand from our agency accounts and its certainly a heavy task to keep up with real time link tracking. After having searched the depths of the internet to find and locate both free and premium link checkers I still found myself unsatisfied. That’s why I want to share with you a Google Sheets link checker method I discovered that allows our agency to track guest post links in real time. The best part about this? It’s free. So let’s get started.
Who Does This Apply To?
Agency’s that purchase guest posts
Website Owners that purchase guest posts
people who are guest post vendors.
Keep in mind, the internet is ever shifting, meaning, its hard to control when a website goes down IF you do not own it. So for PlacementSEO, this strategy works great. If a link ever goes down, or if a permalink changes, our team gets an immediate email.
Step One: Open a new Google sheet which you will add all of the URLs you want to track. One the sheet is open, give the sheet a name in the top left corner of the window, as demonstrated in the screenshot below.
Once you have opened Google Sheets and have assigned a name to the sheet itself, you need to head over to the tools tab, and click on scripts editor. Checkout the screenshot below per demonstration.
Once you have opened the Scripts Eiditor, go ahead and clear the default code and paste the exact code below.
— code begin – do not copy this line, only copy below —
function HTTPResponse( uri )
{
var response_code ;
try {
response_code = UrlFetchApp .fetch( uri ) .getResponseCode() .toString() ;
}
catch( error ) {
response_code = error .toString() .match( / returned code (\d\d\d)\./ )[1] ;
}
finally {
return response_code ;
}
}
—– code end, do not copy this line, copy above —-
You can view my example below.
After you paste the code, do not forget to name this code sheet as circled in red via the screenshot above. Once you have pasted the script above into the scripts editor you should be able to close the window AFTER CLICKING THE SAVE BUTTON.
Now that we’ve codded our script, we need to add the function to our spreadsheet, which is VERY easy to accomplish.
The function you will be copying into each cell is the following: =httpresponse(). Between the parentheses you will put which row number your link is in. Checkout the screenshot below.
The function =httpresponses, calls for the script to run that we added via the scripts editor. The (a1), tells the script to check the status of the link provided in Column A1. The status provided will be either the number 200, which means the link is live, or 404, which means the link went offline. You can copy and paste the function easily which auto populates the parentheses data. Checkout the screenshot below.
You can see that when I copied and pasted the function into row 10, the () automatically filled in as (A10). Now, lets add some links to track. In this demo I am going to throw some live links from PlacementSEO and also purposefully throw some 404s in there.
You can see three things happening in the screenshot above. The loading message means the script is checking the link to see if its accessible. The 200’s mean that the links are live, and the 404s mean the links are down and you should check on them.
A consideration to make.
For one, you have to login to the sheet, delete the links, and then undo the deletion to re-run the script check. Why? Because as soon as you close Google Sheets, the sheet itself goes offline, therefore not even a bot can force the script to run. That said, if you can find me a way to automate this, ill pay you FIFTY DOLLARS just to tell me how, ill do all the work myself.
Now its you’re turn. How do you bulk check links? Let me know in the comments below.
“I quit cold emailing a long time ago. Cold emailing takes too long. I never get any responses from cold emailing prospect clients so I stopped performing this insanely awesome method of self marketing.” Does that sound like something you would say if I personally asked you, “Do you cold email prospect clients?”. If so, wake up, cold emailing is still alive and well when it comes to growing an internet marketing company, or any company type if that matters.
Would you be surprised to hear that our agency sends a few thousand cold emails per week? Would you be surprised to hear that we can easily open more than $10,000 per week in new accounts? Lastly, would it surprise you to learn that we spend about $270.00 per month to scale the way we do when it comes to cold email marketing? To put that into perspective, for every $270.00 we spend on cold email, on average we have a $40,000 dollar return. Not a bad ROI, right?
In all transparency, I’m not here to sell you something, I’m not here to show you what I use while attaching affiliate links. I’m here to help you envision exactly the strategies we use to capture hot leads through cold emailing, without being spammy. So let’s get started.
Here is the Complete Breakdown of my Thirty Minutes Video
1: Finding Relevant Companies to Cold Email
2: Retrieving Contact Information
3: Retrieving VERIFIED Email Addresses
4: Crafting the Perfect Cold Email
5: One Step Customizing Mass Emails
6: Cold Email Tracking and KPI
Here Are the Tools I Use in this Video:
1: Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel (CSV Files not XLS).
I clearly remember the day me and my business partner started PlacementSEO. The days of telling ourselves that a “X” amount of customers paying 500.00 per month would allow us to pay ourselves an actual self sustaining salary. Does that style of thinking seem familiar? Generating more than half a million dollars in revenue our first year in business it’s always fun to take a moment to reflect on how me and Gary made it this far with our agency, and how we continue to grow quickly to this day.
Looking back and reflecting on our success is what has inspired me to write this post as I want to share with those of you who are getting started in the SEO business how to work towards landing your first client at a decent monthly retainer. That’s right, a retainer. For those of you who have little to no experience in running your own SEO agency I want to offer you hope, hope that you CAN get clients on a monthly contract retainer at a price much more than just a few hundred bucks per month. In this blog post, I’m going to tell you exactly how we did it at PlacementSEO, which lead to retainers that continue to pay in tens of thousands of dollars per month.
